Reilly Smith earned Bruins' trust this season

The now 23-year-old scored 20 goals and 51 points while playing all 82 games.

By Dan CagenDaily News staff

BOSTON — Looked at as a whole, there is no way to look at Reilly Smith's debut season with the Bruins as anything but a success.

The now 23-year-old scored 20 goals and 51 points while playing all 82 games, grabbed a promotion up to the second line, then scored four goals in 12 playoff games, including the winner in the Game 2 victory over the Canadiens in the second round.

Yet the season wasn't all breezy for the young winger. He came down with a bad illness after the Olympic break, one that coincided with a wicked slump. Smith has never made excuses for scoring just two goals in the final 30 games of the regular season.

“I was definitely maybe gripping my stick a little too tight during the end of the season, but things like that are going to happen when you go through a little bit of a slump and a bit of a drought,” Smith said Friday, two days after the Bruins' season ended with a second-round loss to the Canadiens. “I was just happy that I was able to contribute and help our team win some games.”

The Bruins easily could have strayed away from Smith down the stretch. Loui Eriksson, originally intended as a second-line fixture, was playing his best hockey of the season. But coach Claude Julien didn't bump Smith down in the lineup, partially because of the chemistry Eriksson had developed with Carl Soderberg on the third line, but also because of the faith that Smith had already earned with the coaching staff.

Putting trust in a young player is akin to loaning money to a teenager — you’re hoping you get a return, but there are no guarantees. The Bruins got more back than Smith than they could have expected. In a dressing room full of players who came up smaller than expected — David Krejci, Brad Marchand, Milan Lucic — Smith raised his game in the playoffs.

“It says a lot about the confidence and the opportunity that they’ve given me all year long,” Smith said. “It’s been great. It’s been a joy being able to play with some of these guys, to have that confidence from the coach and your teammates to stick with you if things aren’t going great, so I couldn’t be happier with how things played out.”

The expectations will be even higher for Smith next season. He could fly under the radar for much of this year, a bonus after Eriksson took most of the spotlight as the return in the Tyler Seguin trade.

“You try to push yourself even more,” he said of his expectations for next season. “I think that’s one thing going into next year is the bar is set so much higher now, and that’s one thing I’m going to have to come back next season and improve and be able to excel [in] my game way more than my previous expectations were.”

Before that comes the first significant contract negotiations of his career, though. Smith is a restricted free agent this summer. He made $900,000 this season, and could be in for a sizable raise.

Wingers with comparable numbers coming off entry-level deals usually are paid between $2 million and $3 million per season. The low-end comparison would be the two-year, $3.8 million contract Drew Stafford signed with Buffalo in 2009, and the high side the five-year, $15 million deal Michael Grabner received from the Islanders in 2011, although neither is a perfect comparable for Smith.

“I honestly haven’t started thinking about that at all,” Smith said of the upcoming negotiation. “I’ve been just trying to just take everything in.”

And that everything was pretty good. Smith came into training camp last September as an unknown to his teammates and the coaching staff, a name in a trade that many of them had never heard of or seen play.

“I remember when I was traded, you don’t really know what to expect,” Smith said. “I couldn’t be happier with how everything turned out, and being able to come here and play with this group of guys was an unbelievable experience for me. I couldn’t be happier.”